Monthly Archives: April 2013

I am a terribly slow writer of poems. Months and months go by and I don’t write anything at all. So, imagine my surprise to have gone on a retreat this past weekend and written four poems! Four! Two are definite keepers, and two are on the fence, but are at least good starts. That’s a miracle, for me. Encouraged, I finally worked up the courage to see how many poems I have toward a new book manuscript. I’ve avoided conducting such an inventory, for fear that the number would be discouragingly low. I found that I have 33! That’s more than halfway there. Much better than I expected.

The four new poems are for my Minnesota State Arts Board grant project–the Incantation Bowls project (click for info)–and the bowls are also in production. In the photo below, a student assistant to my collaborator Tiffany Besonen works on assembly. So exciting to see this thing that Tiffany I dreamed up actually beginning to exist!

LouAnn Muhm is the recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is funded, in part, by the Minnesota State Legislature from the State’s arts and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on Nov. 4, 2008.

My good friend, visual artist Tiffany Besonen, and I began ourcollaborations with a piece entitled “i am water”–a two panel large collage of sewing patttern paper, wax, paint and human hair that is block-printed with a fragment of one of my poems. The piece has been on tour around the country since 2007 in a show entitled “The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces” curated by Jennifer Heath. I was fortunate enough to see the show at one of its stops–at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee–and it was an incredible collection of art exploring all aspects of the veil, actual and metaphoric.

The show has now ended its tour, and “i am water” has come back to Tiffany, after six years and fourteen states. Read Tiffany’s post about its homecoming, here: http://tbesonen.blogspot.com/.

That piece was the first of our collaborations, and now we are in the midst of another, bigger one. Read all about our current project here.

The poems for this new project are coming more slowly than I had hoped, so I’m off for a short silent retreat this weekend. May the muse be with me!